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Books like Le Guide Culinaire

Le Guide Culinaire

Every lawyer must read Holmes' The Common Law. Every doctor must read the Corpus Hippocraticum. Every priest must read Aquinas' Summa Theologica. So it is that every serious cook should read Escoffier. The author did not write this magnum opus with the home cook in mind; it was written for cooking professionals and therefor omits much of the instruction necessary to a mass-market cookbook in the 21st Century. His goal was to organize and simplify the classic French cooking of Antoine Carême, who he regarded as a master of haute cuisine. The result is useful in varying ways. It contains many recipes which the modern cook will not attempt; he assumes that one has unlimited supplies of truffles and fois gras at hand. His recipe for turtle soup includes detailed instructions on how to kill the turtle and get it out of its shell. The techniques were written down before the invention of the blender, the food processor and the convection oven; they need to be adjusted accordingly. His measurements vary from finicky precise to opaquely vague: exactly 9/10 of a pint of this and "a glassful" of that; exactly 207 degrees Fahrenheit and the temperature of a "warm oven." But it is all Escoffier, who came down from the mountaintop bearing nearly a thousand pages of culinary commandments. I thought it would take a year to read them all; the task was accomplished in only ten months. They were ten months well spent.

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